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Globalization, Mundialización: Civilizing Processes and the Relocation of Languages and Knowledges

Walter D. Mignolo

in Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

This chapter identifies some of the instances in which the denial of the denial of coevalness materializes itself by redressing and implementing long-lasting forces, sensibilities, and rationalities ... More

This chapter identifies some of the instances in which the denial of the denial of coevalness materializes itself by redressing and implementing long-lasting forces, sensibilities, and rationalities repressed by the one-sided ideology of the “civilizing mission/process,” and its complicity in the subalternization of knowledges and cultural production throughout the planet. Remapping new world order implies remapping cultures of scholarship and the scholarly loci of enunciation from where the world has been mapped. The crisis of “area studies” is the crisis of old borders, be they nation borders or civilization borders. It is also the crisis of the distinction between hegemonic (discipline-based knowledges) and subaltern (area-based knowledges), as if discipline-based knowledges are geographically disincorporated.Less

Elias’s Explanation of the European Civilizing Process

Andrew Linklater

in The Idea of Civilization and the Making of the Global Order

This chapter explains Elias’s pioneering analysis of the European civilizing process – the process in which they came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized. It discusses his examination of how ... More

This chapter explains Elias’s pioneering analysis of the European civilizing process – the process in which they came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized. It discusses his examination of how state formation, internal pacification, and rising interdependencies were linked with the development of new standards of propriety and new expectations of self-restraint. Changing attitudes to violence were integral parts of the overall direction of change. Civilized people came to regard judicial torture and capital punishment as antithetical to their refined ways of life. Changing manners were related developments. Those movements influenced European attitudes to non-European peoples. They underpinned the belief that colonialism was necessary to spread civilization. Elias did not argue that the process of civilization was evidence of human progress. The chapter discusses his analysis of decivilizing processes in Nazi Germany and the argument that sociological inquiry should seek to explain the shifting balances of power between civilizing and decivilizing processes in human figurations.Less

Civilizing Processes at the Level of Humanity as a Whole

Andrew Linklater

in The Idea of Civilization and the Making of the Global Order

This chapter discusses Elias’s investigation of civilizing processes that have affected humanity as a whole and analyses his criteria for assessing the relative power of civilizing and decivilizing ... More

This chapter discusses Elias’s investigation of civilizing processes that have affected humanity as a whole and analyses his criteria for assessing the relative power of civilizing and decivilizing trends. Four criteria are considered – whether controls on violence are increasing or in decline; whether there are significant changes in the rely power of internal and external constraints on conduct; whether emotional identification between peoples is widening or contracting; and whether support for international planning to protect the vulnerable from the problems stemming from global interconnections is on the rise or is weakening. Those yardsticks inform the discussion of Huntington’s idea of a clash of civilizations and English School descriptions of the civilizing potential of international society. The chapter ends with reflections on the importance of shared symbols for a global civilizing process. It considers the complex relations between national-populist movements, images of future global ecological civilizing processes and the political challenges of the Covid-19 health and economic crisis.Less

Vernacular Values

Neil Rhodes

in Shakespeare and the Origins of English

This chapter is concerned with the rise of the vernacular and examines the growing confidence in English as a vehicle for literary expression with reference to such writers as Puttenham, Mulcaster, ... More

This chapter is concerned with the rise of the vernacular and examines the growing confidence in English as a vehicle for literary expression with reference to such writers as Puttenham, Mulcaster, Carew, and Daniel. It extends the theme of moral relativism discussed in the previous chapter into the cultural sphere, and describes the shifting perceptions of classical civility and native English barbarism. It focuses especially on the Renaissance belief in poetry as a central part of the civilizing process, and the importance for the English of developing a native English metre. The chapter looks at the relations between eloquence and barbarity in two plays from the beginning and end of Shakespeare’s career, Titus Andronicus and The Tempest, which reflect the nation’s change in status and anticipate the replacement of Latin by English as the imperial tongue.Less

Summary and Conclusions

Andrew Linklater

in The Idea of Civilization and the Making of the Global Order

Elias’s relatively detached investigation of the civilizing process remains the key starting point for those who wish to understand the nature and legacy of the peculiar civilized self- images that ... More

Elias’s relatively detached investigation of the civilizing process remains the key starting point for those who wish to understand the nature and legacy of the peculiar civilized self- images that arose in the European region.Less

Loïc Wacquant and Norbert Elias: advanced marginality and the theory of the de-civilising Process

John J. Rodger

in Criminalisation and advanced marginality: Critically exploring the work of Loic Wacquant

John Rodger takes up Wacquant's concept of ‘advanced marginality’ arguing that this idea can be situated as a complement to Norbert Elias' well known discussion of ‘civilising processes’. Rodger ... More

John Rodger takes up Wacquant's concept of ‘advanced marginality’ arguing that this idea can be situated as a complement to Norbert Elias' well known discussion of ‘civilising processes’. Rodger argues that a weakness in Elias' social theory is in understanding situations, including the present, in which ‘decivilising processes’ arrest and reverse the historical tendencies to liberal democracy and the decline of violence in western societies, including how states respond. The suggestion is that Wacquant's concept of the advanced marginality and the penal state can fill some important gaps in Elias' argument.Less

Civility, Civilizing Processes, and the End of Public Punishment in England

J. A. SHARPE

in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas

This chapter discusses the end of public punishment in England during the civilizing process. The history of punishment is usually portrayed as a ... More

This chapter discusses the end of public punishment in England during the civilizing process. The history of punishment is usually portrayed as a simple record of progress away from the horrors of Newgate, the pillory, the convict ship, and above all the public execution. It suggests that England experienced the most remarkable shifts in the punishment of criminals during the mid-seventeenth century. This trend may be attributed to the demographic growth, which had been one of the basic facts of English social life for a century before the 1630s.Less

The playground as biosocial technology

Kevin Ryan

in Refiguring childhood: Encounters with biosocial power

Chapter 3 commences the task of staging encounters with biosocial power in the form of social practices. The chapter begins by reviewing Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, as well as more recent ... More

Chapter 3 commences the task of staging encounters with biosocial power in the form of social practices. The chapter begins by reviewing Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, as well as more recent Eliasian perspectives on a ‘de-civilising’ process, using this literature as an interpretative lens in commencing a genealogy of playgrounds. Examined as a biosocial technology, the playground is shown to originate as a pedagogical practice that (to borrow from governmentality theory) attempted to act upon the actions of children through a blend of carefully calibrated techniques, bounded space and purpose-built equipment, the strategic objective of which was to prefigure the future. The empirical focus of the chapter is early nineteenth century Britain and Progressive Era America.Less

Wild Wales: Civilizing the Welsh from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

PRYS MORGAN

in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas

This chapter discusses the civilizing process in Wales from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The absorption of the Welsh into the English state ... More

This chapter discusses the civilizing process in Wales from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The absorption of the Welsh into the English state system in the early sixteenth century was justified by English administrators on the grounds that the Welsh were murderous, barbarous, thieving rogues, civility in the eyes of such men being equated with law-abiding orderliness. The triumph of Protestantism and good order coming as a result of the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543 may have contributed significantly in forwarding civility in Wales.Less

Genocide: From Pathological Altruism to Pathological Obedience

Augustine Brannigan

in Pathological Altruism

Genocide is approached with the assistance of two concepts: pathological altruism and pathological obedience. The first is marked by the utilization of genocide as an elite policy employed for ... More

Genocide is approached with the assistance of two concepts: pathological altruism and pathological obedience. The first is marked by the utilization of genocide as an elite policy employed for self-interests but disguised as preservation of the group. A necessary requirement of genocide is the “pathological obedience” of a large section of the population, as in the case of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. This chapter explores the role of self-control as an explanation of crime. Self-control is stable over the life course but it is argued, following Elias’s work on the “civilizing process,” that levels of self-control can vary over time. The collective investment in how individuals are socialized follows changing social memes. Elias argues that genocide is a reversion to barbarism. Alternatively, pathological obedience may arise from oversocialization, particularly in contexts of militarism and totalitarianism. This suggests that Milgram’s “agentic state” is cultural in origin.Less

Securing Civil Order

Lindsay Farmer

in Making the Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order

The chapter develops the argument that the aim of the criminal law can be understood as that of securing civil order. It examines three overlapping themes. The first is the relation between law and ... More

The chapter develops the argument that the aim of the criminal law can be understood as that of securing civil order. It examines three overlapping themes. The first is the relation between law and civil order. This distinguishes between social order and civil order, and argues that civil order must be understood in terms of the development of the state and the rule of law. The second is the understanding of the criminal law as an instrument and index of civilization. This explores the link between the ‘civilizing process’ and understandings of criminalization. The third looks at the relation between criminal law and civility in the sense of understandings of rules of public and private conduct. Together these form the conceptual framework within which criminalization has come to be understood.Less

The Civilizing Process: Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West

Richard Leppert

in Musical Meaning and Human Values

This chapter focuses on the David Belasco work, The Girl of the Golden West. This was seen on its first peformance by Giacomo Puccini in 1907, while he was on his visit to New York. Puccini was ... More

This chapter focuses on the David Belasco work, The Girl of the Golden West. This was seen on its first peformance by Giacomo Puccini in 1907, while he was on his visit to New York. Puccini was searching for his next project when he saw the play of Belasco. Belasco specialized in melodrama emphasizing naturalism. The Girl of the Golden West is about a young woman living in a mining camp mostly populated by men. The setting of Belasco's play and Puccini's opera are situated within the Sierra Nevada mountains. Their works sparked the modernist ideologies which governed the civilizing process. Lastly, the two envisioned the time–space relations.Less

The International Society of ‘Civilized States’

Andrew Linklater

in The Anarchical Society at 40: Contemporary Challenges and Prospects

Bull argued that in European international society, the ‘diplomatic culture’, the common stock of ideas and values the representatives of states shared had been strengthened by an ‘international ... More

Bull argued that in European international society, the ‘diplomatic culture’, the common stock of ideas and values the representatives of states shared had been strengthened by an ‘international political culture’, the intellectual and moral culture that determined societal attitudes towards the states-system. With the expansion of international society, he contended, the diplomatic culture had lost much of its earlier foundation in the normative commitments specific to European international society. It was conceivable, Bull argued, that a new ‘cosmopolitan culture’ will succeed in binding peoples together in the first universal society of states. To consider those issues further, this essay draws on Elias’s writings to show how conceptions of ‘civilized manners’ and ‘civilized’ statehood linked the international political and diplomatic cultures. The discussion also considers some recent writings on the civilizational dynamics of world politics that have special relevance for Bull’s reflections on how those two cultures might develop in future.Less

Civility and Barbarism: Emotions as Criteria of Difference*

Margrit Pernau

in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000

This chapter traces how the control of passions, the creation of milder emotions, and their appropriate expression came together in the concept of civility in the eighteenth century. The ... More

This chapter traces how the control of passions, the creation of milder emotions, and their appropriate expression came together in the concept of civility in the eighteenth century. The encyclopedias used the concept, it is argued, to allocate a place in a hierarchical society to each individual; at the same time, linking civility's emotions to civil society endowed them with a central role in the new Enlightenment vision of society. The chapter goes on to argue that it was the widening of the gaze in the age of exploration and conquest that shifted the object of the civilizing process from the individual to society. This turned the opposition between the civilized and the barbarians into a central criterion of distinction, ascribing to each society its place in the new global order of the age of colonialism. The last section follows up the somatization of these differences through the racial discourse.Less

Explaining Crime and Genocide: The Control Perspective

Augustine Brannigan

in Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide

The control perspective provides a useful general framework for understanding crime in criminology. Impulse control is common to the work of both Travis Hirschi and Norbert Elias. Elias’s arguments ... More

The control perspective provides a useful general framework for understanding crime in criminology. Impulse control is common to the work of both Travis Hirschi and Norbert Elias. Elias’s arguments in The Civilizing Process (1939) and The Germans (1989) are outlined. The analysis of civilizing in the first contribution is compared with the analysis of de-civilizing processes in the second. Elias’s characterization of de-civilizing during the Nazi period as a reversion to ‘barbarism’ is questioned. In the author’s view, the feudal period and the Nazi regime did not share the same emotional economies. On the contrary, Elias’s views suggest that in political matters, the Germans were over-controlled, or externally controlled. The author revises the Eliasian perspective following Durkheim’s analysis of ‘altruistic’ pathologies where ego’s autonomy is absorbed by authoritarian rule, and crime arises when the individual’s authority for action is governed by the sovereign’s grip over the public imagination.Less

Introduction

Matthew Lockwood

in The Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern English State

The introduction outlines previous definitions of the modern state as well as historians’ current explanations of state formation in early modern Europe and England. It demonstrates that earlier ... More

The introduction outlines previous definitions of the modern state as well as historians’ current explanations of state formation in early modern Europe and England. It demonstrates that earlier scholars have focused almost entirely on the state’s ability to engage in active warfare and have thus neglected an important aspect of the monopoly of violence, the restriction of non-state or illegitimate violence. The introduction also explores the medieval background of the coroner system, the mechanism designed to regulate violence in England and explains why the system had failed to achieve its proposed ends prior to the sixteenth century.Less

“Every Youth a Start-up”: Education and Training in Silicon Valley

Elsa Davidson

in The Burdens of Aspiration: Schools, Youth, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley

This chapter examines the education and training of Latino youth within the local and national context, with particular emphasis on the emergent civic agenda around the digital divide in Silicon ... More

This chapter examines the education and training of Latino youth within the local and national context, with particular emphasis on the emergent civic agenda around the digital divide in Silicon Valley. It considers the political implications and historical context of this regional “civilizing process” and its relation to a neoliberal politics of educational reform on the national scale by focusing on the production of two kinds of disciplined “subjects” in need of saving: at-risk youth and public educational and nonprofit social-service institutions. It also explores how the realities of the tech-bust era have turned disenfranchised young people, and many who provide services to them, into skeptics of neoliberal reform.Less

Saneface Minstrelsy: Blacking Up in the Asylum

in Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

This chapter explores the life of a curious blackface minstrel troupe composed of patients at the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Performing several times a year for patients, doctors, and visitors, ... More

This chapter explores the life of a curious blackface minstrel troupe composed of patients at the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Performing several times a year for patients, doctors, and visitors, they turned a famously carnivalesque popular form into a therapeutic diversion for other patients in a display meant to convince the outside world—and perhaps themselves—that they, unlike the black characters they mocked, were capable of rationally managing their affairs in the modern world. The chapter also examines patients' writings about these performances, in which they reflect on how the social categories of blackness and mental alienation resemble one another. This discussion encompasses an analysis of the interplay between strategies of confinement and uplift common to plantation slavery, the colonial enterprise, and institutional psychiatry. The chapter uses the episode to argue that the “civilizing process,” which proved such a potent argument behind Euro-American colonization and enslavement of blacks, also structured the relations between doctors and patients.Less